Wednesday, July 04, 2012

With Mass Effect behind us, I've resubscribed to The Old Republic. I've also took the opportunity to uninstall Mass Effect 2 and 3, and especially Origin. Getting rid of Origin brought a smile to my face.

I was thinking about The Secret World, but I feel that I left The Old Republic "unfinished." Plus, this will give some time for The Secret World to work out all the bugs, before I give it a real whirl.

(Though, there is something about being in a game at launch, discussing and writing about it early. Before the game becomes solved.)

I ended up deleting all my alternate characters, and only transferred my 50 Imperial Agent to the new high-pop server. Sadly, my name was taken, so I had to use an different name. I decided to start a new Jedi Knight to ease back into the game.

I think that TOR has improved by leaps and bounds. In particular, their performance optimization team has done a spectacular job. Basic engine performance is miles better than it was at release. As well, there are lots of people on the new server, making the game seem vibrant and alive. Lots of chat too, even with TOR's flood of system messages.

The Legacy system has been fleshed out, and has all sorts of options. I haven't really explored much here.

I haven't really gotten a chance to try the group finder yet. My 50 is DPS, so the queues are very long. Plus I don't really remember how to play her, so I'll have to re-learn everything. I'm also not too sure what the path in endgame is like.

Still, I like the improved TOR so far. We'll have to see if I can get into its endgame, though.

Posted by
Rohan

5 comments:

Mine's installed via Steam, which may give me a different perspective. But if anything I'm more interested in playing ME2's campaign than ME3's campaign (though I'm finishing a ME3 campaign to see the "extended nonsense" scenes).

I haven't played much myself recently, but with 1.3, I'm finding it much better as well. I moved servers (Rubat Crystal - > Ebon Hawk), and find that 3-5 tims the population on any given planet has made it much more enjoyable, at least for finding groups. Even as DPS, I haven't had to wait more than 15-30 minutes (either on my level 50 Sorc, or my level 21 Sentinel) for a group, and at least on my lower level toons, I can now continue to quest while waiting for a group, which was not something you could easily do before.

Your name is taken if it deviates 1 letter from a name which is taken. For example, my operative was called Luckylucy and there was nobody playing by that name. But there was someone called Luckyluck. Yeah, that is one letter difference but since it is the last letter and means completely different there cannot be confusement ...

So I lost that attachment with my toons as well. My pwtech was called Nuts'n'bolts; apparently taken too. It really saddens me because I was attached to the name (I called her Nuts because that was how people were shortening the name when addressing me in PvP).

As for operative DPS. I hate to burst your bubble but if you're concealment you're pretty much useless now. In PvP, all the operatives who haven't rerolled went medicine (making it like the druid in vanilla). If you're lethality you can supposedly get good DPS with multiDoTing thereby putting pressure on healer (so I heard). Instead, I went healer before patch 1.2 went live (sick of being concealment in Huttball) because I knew concealment would be nerfed in 1.2. And all this because Mr Georg Zoeller has statistics which prove people /unsub when they die from a team of operatives.

Now Georg Zoeller lost a subscription because someone cannot be bothered to switch main (and go grind BM and WH) and cannot be bothered to heal in MMO anymore (done it enough in MMOs, and it is rather cumbersome in this one w/o addons). Of course there were more reasons to /unsub (performance of the game on a state of the art computer? Nah, it cannot possibly be that). The other problem is that both concealment and lethality are not competitive in PvE, and were not before patch 1.2. It is frustrating being DD, knowing you're getting carried not because of your lack of skill but because even when you do follow your rotation near perfect your DPS is just too low compared to the marauder (who are OP in both PvE and PvP).

The path in end-game works like this: you become level 50 and you get a starter set for PvP. You can also just buy the recruit gear for PvP. With this gearset you can do LFD, normal operations, and possibly hardmode operations (which aren't hard at all). EV, after the bugs are fixed, is quite easy in both modes. I never tried the most difficult because I know you need to grind the gear from hard mode then (which I often passed, although the snipers usually got all +cunning already so it goes to me anyway).

There's still a bit of "you MUST do XXX" going on in TOR, however. I suppose old hands will call it EQ-isms, but I think of it as WoW-isms.

I was puttering around Taris last night, unloading some Heroics in my quest log, when some folks were collecting bodies for the World Boss. As it turns out, an L50 had stopped by to help tank the thing. One of the people in Gen Chat started taking the L50 to task, since he should be 'gearing up to raid' rather than playing around in a lowbie zone.

Several of us basically told him to shut up, saying that the L50 can do whatever he wants.

Still, I was disappointed that in a game that has a completely different social atmosphere from WoW still has those Wow-isms out there.